Solna felt ill. Nausea twisted her stomach into shapes she had previously considered impossible. Fear, the terrible boogeyman the Jedi were certain led straight to the Dark Side, ran down her arms like spikey veins of ice. What she was about to do was evil, and wrong, and dangerous, and going to scar her forever.

Or so she’d been taught.

She had always been a good listener, she’d always been an attentive student, and she’d always absorbed the lessons her elders had provided for her.

As she and Rassi and Nulo and Moffvok took their places in the meditation circle though, she saw how little she truly believed what she’d been taught.

Or, rather, how many problems and disparities she’d seen between what was taught to her and how her elders actually acted.

Everyone was supposed to keep themselves as quiet as they could within the Xah. Everyone was supposed to obey the Enclave Elders at all time. And having or showing emotions? Emotions weren’t officially disapproved of, but emotions which led to disturbances in the Xah were shameful badges which could mark someone as being unstable, unworthy, and unwanted.

Except when they were expected. Or the person expressing them was important enough.

A boy got “rambunctious”, or fought with another boy? Well what did anyone expect? That was what boys did. They put a tidal wave into the Xah with their anger? Well I’m sure it wasn’t that bad. You’re just very sensitive, remember?

Rassi talked back to someone who was bullying her? Did she get mad? Did anyone hear anything change in the Xah? They did? Oh, she is dangerous and uncontrolled. Have to send her to remedial training again. Or maybe find some new punishment for her so she’ll learn to control herself. 

Anger and fear have an odd relationship. The flames of Solna’s anger at those memories should have melted the icy fear in her arms and stomach but instead both sensations simply burned her.

And she could not, under any circumstances, take that into the mediation.

“Are you okay?” Rassi asked, taking Solna’s hand before their shared meditation could begin.

“Yeah, I just need a moment,” Solna said, feeling her past crashing over her again and again.

“She’s upset,” Nulo said, without any notes of judgment in her voice.

“We’ve had a long day,” Rassi said.

“Perhaps you might want to wait until you’ve rested then?” Kelda’s suggestion sounded wise to Solna, except for the part where the value of their message to Ms. Ayli was diminishing as time passed.

“I’ll be fine,” Solna said. “I just don’t want to bring any corrupt Xah, uh, I mean Dark Side influence, into what we’re doing.” 

Referring to the Xah as the Force felt decidedly weird. Saying it in Shyriiwook would probably have felt less dishonest. Intellectually, she knew with absolute certainty that what Nix and the other Force Users worked with was the same thing she was trained to listen to. She’d felt how the Xah moved in response to their manipulations of it and there couldn’t be any doubt.

A lifetime of thinking of it as the Xah was not so easily abandoned though. Not even when she was growing rapidly more grateful than Rassi had possessed the courage to abandon the Enclave and the kindness to make sure they both got away together.

Moffvok growled in a contemplative manner. Solna couldn’t speak Shyriiwook at all but between listening to the actual sound of Moffvok’s words and leaving herself open to the Xah, Solna felt like she was able to capture a little more than just the general mood the Wookie was expressing.

“He says maybe don’t completely suppress the Dark Side,” Nulo translated for them.

“Suppressing our Dark Sides rarely works out well,” Kelda, of all people, said.

“What she means is that we were taught to confront our Dark Sides,” Ravas explained when she saw the confusion on the kids faces. “Struggling to resist it was seen as a losing battle.”

“Because it usually is,” Ravas said. “Though even in our time, I think we saw a lot of people who used ‘confronting their Dark Side’ as an excuse to simply deny it.”

“So, wait, what are we supposed to do then?” Rassi asked. Because Rassi had such a messy relationship with the Xah that she would probably both try and refuse any ideas which were offered to her. Which was just impossible to deal with.

No.

Solna focused a moment on her breathing. 

Rassi was not the problem.

The people they’d been surrounded by, they were the problem.

Solna had suspected that since she was able to form words and had known it for far longer than she was willing to admit to herself. Even light years away from them, she could still feel the weight of Enclave pressing down on her and smothering the things she knew to be true.

Rassi was amazing.

There.

That was something the Enclave could never make her deny.

Rassi was amazing and Solna knew she could prosper with the training she could get outside the Enclave. She knew that and she was going to trust that Rassi would find a way to believe it too.

“Recognize what’s inside you,” Ravas said. “My Dark Side didn’t appear the moment I chose to cast the Jedi aside and become a Sith. And it hasn’t disappeared since I left the Sith behind.”

“And being a Jedi didn’t mean I was mystically free of angry impulses, or fearful ones,” Kelda said. “When I was at peace though, I could see those impulses for what they were.”

“What about when anger is all you can feel?” Solna asked, still feeling the fires of rage lurking around the memories of the Silent Enclave.

“Admit that,” Kelda said. “When we’re angry, or afraid, we wind up thinking all sorts of things that seem so right and natural in the moment. Admitting that you’re terrified though is the first step to recognizing that you’re not thinking clearly.”

“What’s the next step?” Rassi asked.

“Letting go,” Ravas said. “Which does not mean what you think it does.”

“It’s not forgetting,” Nulo said, repeating what Solna suspected was the official Horizon Knight teaching on the matter.

“And it’s not telling yourself that you shouldn’t be bothered by what your feeling,” Ravas said. “That’s a very easy trap to fall into.”

“Letting go, in this context, is as much about giving yourself permission to feel whatever you feel, while also stepping back and finding the distance to see that fear, anger, despair, those are only feelings. They can be a natural response to the stimuli we’re under but they only have the power that we give them, and they never need to dictate our actions.”

“Master Lasha said if we’re afraid, the Force will show us where the danger is and our job is to survive it,” Nulo said. “But that to do that we need to protect ourselves, not lash out and leave ourselves open to mistakes or counter attacks.”

“And once your survival isn’t on the line?” Kelda asked. “When your in your bed at night and the monster you fought that day is still the center of memories which won’t let you go?”

“I don’t know,” Nulo said. “I think we’re supposed to go talk to her then.”

“Sharing with others can be a powerful tool for letting go,” Kelda said. “And you shouldn’t need to be exposed to the kind of things that will give you nightmares.”

“No one should,” Ravas said. “But it happens anyway. Not facing those things alone though? That will save you so much trouble in the long run.”

“You know that’s why Lasha and Monfi are asking you to sit this one out, right?” Kelda said.

Moffvok growled.

“They want to keep us safe,” Nulo said.

“Even if we can help,” Solna said.

“Do you know the kind of people who use the young and inexperienced to make their battles easier?” Ravas asked.

“Was that a Jedi thing?” Solna asked, aware that she might be giving offense with the question but she felt like the teaching that Jedi stole people’s children was one that had to have some basis in truth.

“Before a Padawan could first accompany their master on a mission, their mastery of the Force was tested rigorously, as was their maturity, and their desires for the kind of service they wished to pursue,” Kelda said.

“The Jedi didn’t all run around killing people with lightsabers, did they?” Rassi asked.

“In our day, the Jedi almost never took someone’s life,” Kelda said. “That was something that changed when the last war broke out, and even then there were still archivists, and medics, and diplomats who never so much as lit the blade of their lightsabers.”

“Oh,” Solna said. The idea of a Jedi being someone who was responsible for chronicling things filling a void she’d never know she had.

Oddly it made what they were about to do seem better too.

After all, why shouldn’t they talk to the Xah? If the Xah could be ‘corrupted’ by every passing thought and stray emotion then everyone would be twisting it into Dark Side nexuses all over the place. 

A deep ache had always lurked in Solna’s soul. She wanted to understand her world. She wanted to understand the people in it and the places and the history of everything that had gone before her.

Staying forever silent though meant never asking for those answers. It meant never ‘bothering’ the world with the fact of her existence.

It meant never being able to recognize how the Elders were using her for their own ends. 

“You said I shouldn’t suppress my anger,” she said as a fresh fire kindled in her. “But what if I don’t want to walk away from it. What if what they did shouldn’t be forgiven?”

She didn’t elaborate on who ‘they’ were. Rassi knew she was talking about the Elders and everyone else could sense her meaning in the Xah. 

“Ah, righteous anger,” Kelda said. “That can be the most seductive and the most destructive.”

“Much like the fear of real peril, those feelings are serving their purpose,” Ravas said. “They spur us to action and help us unleash strengths we would normally hold in reserve.”

“All while stripping us of the ability to exercise restraint where it’s warranted,” Kelda said.

“Which is why the key to letting those go is to earn your own trust,” Ravas said.

“The urge to action anger gives us is meant to goad us to action. We don’t want the conditions which spurred the anger to repeat again. Anger can show us that, but we don’t need anger to tell us how to address the problem its brought to our attention.”

“Anger is excellent at raising alarms, and terrible at handling their causes,” Ravas said.

“So we have to earn the trust of ourselves. That gives us an answer to our angers and our fears. We can believe that we will act without anger or fear to guide us once we’ve proven to ourselves that we can. “

“That sounds like it’s a lot harder to do than to say.” Rassi had her own angers (too few in Solna’s opinion) and fears (too many and too well founded). 

“It is,” Ravas said. “I’m still trying to get the hang of it in fact.”

“As am I,” Kelda said. “Which is good. None of us will ever be or should ever be perfect. But we get better through practice, and we learn as we go.”

“You’ll make mistakes,” Ravas said. “Trust that you’ll learn from them and that tomorrow you’ll be a little better than today.”

Solna tried looking at her anger at the Enclave in those terms. She couldn’t forget it, and she couldn’t put it aside, but she was able to believe that her future self wouldn’t let her down. She would deal with the Enclave at some point, and she wouldn’t do so in a mindless rage.

Whatever the Enclave deserved, she was better than that.

“Let’s let Ms. Ayli know that helps on the way then!” she said, opening her mind and touching the Xah as deeply as it touched her.